'Rampage' Director Brad Peyton Has Seen 'Predator' 365 Times



Rampage director Brad Peyton isn't joking around when he says he takes 1987's Predator seriously.

Really, really seriously.

"I have seen Predator over 365 times," Peyton said during a recent visit to Heat Vision Breakdown, which is The Hollywood Reporter's new video series focusing on genre films and geek culture.

For anyone who knows Peyton's work, it might make sense that he grew up on the Arnold Schwarzenegger classic. Peyton's San Andreas stars Dwayne Johnson as a heroic helicopter pilot; Predator features one of the greatest lines in cinema ever ("get to the chopper!"). Peyton's Rampage centers on the hunt for impossibly dangerous monsters. Predator features an impossibly dangerous alien hunting the most seasoned military men on planet Earth.

"When that movie came out, I had a friend who would record everything on VHS. I borrowed his VHS tape and I watched Predator one summer, literally every single day," Peyton said. "I had seen it previous to that probably 10 times, and I've seen it later that a lot. So I know for a fact I have definitely seen it for a year."

In a strange way, Predator brought Peyton his first directing gig. As a kid, he and his friends would play a game called Predator, in which he served as something of a mix of film director and Dungeons & Dragons dungeon master, calling out the action.

"We would go to the mall and buy toy guns," Peyton said. "We would go into the woods and we would play Predator … and I'm directing them, as to where the Predator is, who got shot. 'Oh no! You just got shot in the leg!' And everyone would act out the parts."

Peyton’s love for Predator was the inspiration for one scene in particular in Rampage featuring Joe Manganiello, who plays a mercenary tasked with hunting down one of the monsters.

“When I talked to Joe, I was like, 'Predator is one of my favorite movies of all time and I have a sequence in that’s like Predator but with this giant wolf and I’d love for you to be the head of the team that takes this on," Peyton recalled.

Manganiello responded he was "100 percent in" due to the actors' mutual love of Predator.

"I finally get to make a bite size version of Predator on this movie," said Peyton.

(For movie fans who want to rival Peyton's love of Predator, we suggest reading this oral history of the film, which proves that the making of the movie was even wilder than you'd think. Among the tidbits are competing stories explaining the firing of Jean-Claude Van Damme — who originally played the Predator — as well as why the studio shut the film down in the middle of production.)

With Rampage, he also is getting to parlay his love of video games into a big budget movie. The film is based on the 1980s arcade game about three monsters who terrorize various cities across the U.S. Peyton grew up on the Nintendo Entertainment System, and even humbly admits he got his name printed in the now-defunct Nintendo Power magazine for a high score in Tetris (that's like an Oscar for a young video game player).

"Then I was like, 'Oh damn. I'm not going to have a career if I just keep doing this,' " he said.

He retired from video games, and missed out on all advances from NES until Xbox 360, and his videogame addiction began anew as he was shocked by how good the technology was ("I was pure Encino Man. I was Brendan Fraser at the peak. What is going on?")

"So I then went hard; I beat Need for Speed and Lost Planet. I finished everything in Mad Max. I collected everything and I did the same thing for Red Dead Redemption," he said. "I love them, but I chose very carefully because of that. Otherwise I won't work for two months."

'Rampage' Star Went Method to Play a Gorilla

Rampage star Jason Liles really went ape for his latest role.

For his emotional performance-capture role as George, an albino gorilla who's best friends with The Rock, Liles studied gorillas for months and even stayed in character on set between takes.

Liles worked with stars he admires like Dwayne Johnson (primatologist Davis Okoye) and Oscar-nominee Naomie Harris (Dr. Kate Caldwell), but he didn't have time to pal around with his co-stars on set. He had to tackle demanding scenes in which director Brad Peyton asked him to play a gorilla who's not only having a panic attack while inside a cage, but also is freaked out because he's growing to an incredible size after some genetic experimentation.

"[It was] very Daniel Day Lewis-esque. Not to that extent where it's 24/7, but there were scenes where it was hours and hours — crying, snot coming out of my face — and just holding it and staying in a panic attack. It was exhausting," says the actor of staying in character. "Makeup would come over and try to clean me up. I would just brush their hand away. 'Leave it. Leave it alone if it's not messing up the makeup.'"

Liles, who is six-foot-nine, got the role in part thanks to Colin Strause, the film's visual effects supervisor. The two worked together on Netflix's Death Note, and Strause advocated for Liles to play George.

Before filming, Liles spent months studying gorillas, and then moved on to three weeks of training with Kong: Skull Island's Terry Notary in the Santa Monica mountains. Hiking with Notary (famous for playing Kong) for hours while wearing arm extenders led to "more pain" than Liles had ever felt in his life, thanks to soreness that kicked in on day three. But the most challenging thing he learned to do was to forget the things that made him human, a goal he and Notary accomplished through silence and meditation.

"He told me from the get-go, 'I don't want you to pretend to be a gorilla,'" recalls Liles. "'We are going to shed all the things that make us human, that make you Jason. The society things of keeping eye contact and smiling and nodding and what's polite and what's impolite.' We have to get rid of all of that. Because gorillas don't know any of that."

I liked the way you could walk up and horn in on someone else's game by putting in a quarter.

This still happens in pool halls.